Education
In 2019, the “Forum4Burgenland” platform was created on the initiative of the Burgenland University of Education, the Burgenland Education Directorate and the representatives of the Burgenland ethnic groups. At this year’s conference in the cultural center in Eisenstadt, the focus was on language education from kindergarten to high school.
The “Forum4Burgenland” platform is working on maintaining and promoting the three ethnic group languages Croatian, Hungarian and Burgenland Romani. In the previous year alone, 4,097 pupils from Burgenland were taught one of these ethnic group languages.
“Language was already a topic in kindergarten”
As an educational institution, you have to do more and more to preserve the ethnic groups, because these languages are often no longer spoken sufficiently in the families, says Sabine Weisz, director of the Burgenland University of Education. Everyone has the right to be taught Croatian in their mother tongue and to be able to learn it from kindergarten to high school because it is part of the Burgenland identity, said Martin Ivancsics, spokesman for the permanent conference of the Austrian ethnic groups advisory councils.
The earlier you start, the better and the easier it is to get the children on the path towards multilingualism. Therefore, a corresponding offer is already offered in the elementary pedagogical area in many institutions, according to regional councilor Daniela Winkler (SPÖ).
With new learning variants to success
A proven form of bilingual teaching is so-called “immersion”. The students should immerse themselves in a language. Immersion means enabling children to remain in one language in class for a longer period of time. “This enables the children to learn the speech melody better and improve their language skills,” says Marlen Varga, director of the elementary school in Dürnbach.
Videos are designed to help children learn
The immersion principle has proven itself successfully. It was used, for example, at a summer language camp at the adult education center and it brought great success, says Attila Somogyi, Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Hungarians in Burgenland.
